nations to supply themselves with cloth, iron, and other manufactured
commodities; and to enable them to carry into effect their wishes,
many of them imposed duties having for their object the bringing
together of the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow. This
produced, of course, a necessity for new exertions to underwork those
nations, leading to constant improvements of machinery, each tending
to enable the capitalist more and more to accumulate fortune and
purchase land, the consolidation of which has been continued until at
length it has resulted in the fact, that in place of the 220,000
English land-owners of the days of Adam Smith, there now exist but
30,000, while all the land of Scotland has, as is stated, accumulated
in the hands of 6000 persons.

As the 190,000 proprietors came by degrees to be represented by
day-labourers, pauperism increased, and the labourer became from year
to year more enslaved, and more dependent for existence upon the
favours of farmers, parish beadles, and constables, until at length a
reform of the system having become absolutely necessary, it was
undertaken. Instead, however, of inquiring into the causes of this
increased dependence with a view to their abolition, it was determined
to abolish the relief that they had rendered necessary, and hence the
existence of the new poor-law. By virtue of its provisions, inability
to obtain food became a crime punishable by the separation of husbands
from wives and parents from children; and thus we see that in the last
twenty years English legislation has tended greatly in the same
direction with the domestic slave trade of this country.

Consolidation of the land drove the labourers from the cultivation of
the soil, while improved machinery tended constantly to drive them out
from the factory, and thus were the poor made poorer and weaker, as